"Once the group moved past testimonials of the power of social media, co-moderators Susan Bearden, Sharon Plante, and I helped everyone dig in to discuss how social media should be used effectively in the classroom and how to encourage more colleagues to drink from the river. Bring out your buckets and spoons!

At the end of the last day, we were all amazed at our Twitter experience. We felt connected to a new breed of professionals, the Twitterati, like never before and we saw the amazing power of instant feedback from social media applications like Twitter.

John Boyer, a Virginia Tech instructor who teaches a supersized world geography intro course (2,760 students) with 2 TAs - uses social media to maintain high personal touch with the students and to attract world-famous guest instructores (e.g., Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi).

Twitter has simply become one of the best places for teachers to collaborate, share solutions to common classroom problems, and discuss education policy. In fact, it might just be the best forum teachers have ever had.

My Masters thesis (the full title is The Twitter experience : the role of Twitter in the formation and maintenance of personal learning networks) is now public in the DSpace archives at Royal Roads University.

Social bookmarking. When you save a Web site as a favorite
or bookmark, it's added to a list that stays within that browser. Use another
computer, and you don't have access to that bookmark. When you use a
social-bookmarking service, you save your bookmarks on that server, making them
available to you wherever you access the Web, and allowing you to share them
with others.

Ask your students to create accounts on a social-bookmarking service and to
bookmark Web sites, news articles, and other resources relevant to the course
you're teaching. Create a unique "tag" for your course and have your students
use it, so that their bookmarks can be easily found. Ask students to apply
multiple tags to the resources they bookmark, as a way to help them locate their
bookmarks quickly and to prepare them for the kind of keyword searching they'll
need to do when using library databases. If you're teaching a face-to-face or
hybrid class, be sure to spend some class time having students share their
latest finds, so they can see the connections between this work outside class
and classroom discussions.

Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them
to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook
every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the
class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's
learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and
share.

"Teachers never have enough time. We have curriculum to cover, skills to teach, reports to write and meetings to attend. The demands are endless, both in and outside the classroom. 10 ways to save time, both in and out of the classroom."

The hashtag is "comments4kids". This is a special tag that teachers use to invite anyone who is willing to drop by and read what a class is blogging. It’s also an invitation for you to make a comment or two on what you read.

There is a special hashtag that isn't tied to an event like this though. It's a common event that's happening in classrooms world-wide. The hashtag is "comments4kids". This is a special tag that teachers use to invite anyone who is willing to drop by and read what a class is blogging. It's also an invitation for you to make a comment or two on what you read.

Use twitter as a search engine. Instead of getting information from eg google you get people when searching for a topic on twitter. People who are interested in talking about a topic at a certain time.

Can find out very interesting and sometimes specific information that is better than a google search. In some particiular circumstances there are commentators or companies who would be worth following.